The weather forecast was right. We had 27 mm of rain overnight, and another 7 mm in the
course of the day. My seed trays, none of which were looking happy in the first place, had
another issue to contend with:

Yvonne discovered an electronic organ on Freecycle the other day, and yesterday the owner called
up to say we could pick it
up—in Clunes, 75 km away.
Borrowed Chris' Yeardley's
Landcruiser and off, not
helped by my GPS navigator (or, more accurately, the maps), which are extremely inaccurate
in Clunes—the house we were looking for was decades old, but the maps don't know the house
number. Found the place anyway, and had no particular difficulty transporting it.

Put it in “4”, the room opposite the lounge room (“3”). It's has two manuals of 3 octaves
each, the upper with 6 stops, the lower with 3, and a one-octave pedal with two stops:

In addition, of course, there are lots of electronic special effects which don't seem to add
much to the system. But it works well. What do we do with it? Yvonne has a number of
ideas, but if none of them come to fruition, she'll just have to learn to play it and
accompany me.

Chris Yeardley is flying to Queensland
with Tiger Airways, an
el-cheapo subsidiary of Singapore's
el-cheapo airline of the same name.
It's so el-cheapo that
the Civil Aviation
Safety Authority suspended their license for 5 weeks earlier this year due to safety
concerns. Presumably they're now satisfied of their safety, but there seem to be other
issues. It seems that you need to get your ticket by email and print it out yourself (or,
presumably, find another method that costs more). Chris tried that, but the ticket didn't
come through:

It used to be common that companies were too lame to have
reverse DNS, but it's been a
long time since I've seen that problem. Given that the company encourages email contact,
they could at least play by the rules.

This particualr one was a cultivar “Yankee <mumble>”, and
they didn't have them in stock, but they had others. Decided that we should first plan a
place for the thing and then buy one, probably in the autumn. Instead, bought only
some artichokes and
an Asphodeline liburnica, or “Jacob's
rod”.

After that, back home via Bunnings to buy
some pots and potting mix, and also ended up buying
an Aphelandra squarrosa,
apparently also called “Zebra plant”, which Yvonne wants to hang in the bathroom. I'm not
sure that's the right place for it, but we'll see.

How long does it take to roast beef? I have dozens of answers, all apparently wrong. One
problem, of course, is to know what you're trying to achieve. roastingtimes.com has suggestions, including for
“rare”, “medium” and ”cardboardwell done”, but doesn't say what those terms mean.
Wikipedia gives
USDA recommendations, currently without reference, and with some reason for doubt: apparently
they claim that “medium rare” is a range between 130—140 °F, but that the recommended value
for “medium rare” is 145 °F, in the “medium” range.

In the past I've decided on a temperature of 54° in the middle, probably a little on the
high side (“medium rare” in my book, I suppose). And for that I wrote “about 35 minutes per
kg at 180° with recirculation”. Today we had a roast of 1.27 kg, so it should have taken
about 45 minutes. In fact, it took 66 minutes. It's difficult to compare with
roastingtimes.com, because they use different roasting temperatures, no recirculation, and
they don't accurately define what they're aiming for. But like most recipes, they have a
fixed time component independent of weight (30 minutes at 220° without recirculation), then
20 minutes per kg at 160°. Ignoring the temperatures, that would have made about 55
minutes.

So what do I do next time? Just about everybody has a fixed time at the beginning
independent of the weight of the cut (clearly an approximation; you can't road a 100 g piece
of meat for 30 minutes at 220° and expect it to be edible), then a time dependent on the
weight. Probably what's needed is a second-order equation. For the time I'll just note the
cooking time, and I can fit curves later.

As I've noted on many occasions, I don't have a
completely functional laptop. I must have about 7 of them, but the most recent is 6 years
old, and only two seem marginally functional: the Dell Inspiron 5100 which seems to be
shutting down more and more frequently, and the Inspiron 1150 with the dead USB bus.
Currently only the 5100 has a functional disk. But for things like visiting the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens I don't need
USB: I can just move the disk from the 5100 to the 1150.

Tried that, and FreeBSD came up with almost no
problems. Just not a mouse. I've seen that before: there's some flag to be set, and I knew
that I had mentioned it here somewhere. But Google seemed a better choice, and led me to this article, which had the
advantage of referring to identically the same laptop. Just add

After that, things worked as if nothing had changed. Conveniently, the article also had a
date on it, and that gave me a pointer to the diary article on the subject.

But I normally run Microsoft on this box (thus the system name pain). Tried that
too. The system spontaneously reset, even in “safe mode”. This machine has only 384 MB of
memory, compared to 512 MB on the other machine. I wonder if the system is expecting to
find all the memory, or whether it just doesn't want to work on even marginally different
hardware. What a pain this Microsoft stuff is! And how aptly named the system!

Plenty of things to do in the garden today, and did some of them. The Meyer lemon was
clearly in need of attention, and repotted it in one of the pots I bought yesterday, in the
process pruning a little and planting some of the cuttings.

I was expecting the roots to look unhappy, but there was no obvious problem. About the only
issue is that they looked quite dry. It's interesting to note that the leaves fell off a
couple of branches only, but then completely. Am I maybe not watering enough? I'm
beginning to think that I'm missing some important understanding about keeping plants in a
greenhouse. It has been finished since April, and it's only now that things are getting
warmer. To be on the safe side, left the lemon out of the greenhouse in the north-facing
area in front of the shade area, where it'll get a moderate amount of sun and still be
protected from the wind.

Found Piccola on the verandah today, meowing at
the jasmine. It looks as if
there was some animal in there. Put a stepladder there for her, but she didn't like the
position. But maybe she's found a way that animals get on to the roof, so put the other
ladder on the other side of the jasmine and took her up onto the roof. She spent a lot of
time there, so left her until she wanted to get down again—she doesn't seem to be able to
get down by herself. But later found her up there again. It seems she can climb up the
ladder, but not down it. I wonder if she caught anything.

I've heard from Carlos Eduardo G. Carvalho, better known as Cartola, who's very active on
the panorama scene. He's also yet another FreeBSD user in the Hugin community—all the more surprising that the latest version doesn't build under FreeBSD.
Spent some time looking at the instructions that I had put up
on the Panotools wiki. They're completely
wrong. And despite the volume of this diary, I didn't describe the method in sufficient
detail when I did it. Spent some time
working on the description, but I'm still not done, especially since they've released a new
stable version since then, one that is missing code necessary for the FreeBSD version.

I've been waiting for the weeds to die in the veggie garden, which they have now done, and I
had the artichokes to plant, so finally in and tidied up a little bit. The artichokes are
planted, but the potatoes (due two months ago) are not. Much more attention needed.

Also moved more plants out of the greenhouse to in front of the shade area, next to the
Meyer lemon, where I hope they'll feel happier.

I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that I haven't been watering the plants in the
greenhouse enough, and that that, combined with too-high temperatures, might explain the
problems with the lemon, the seedlings and some other plants. We'll see if they do better
here.

The Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens have a problem: their printer isn't working. And I have taken it upon myself to look after
their computer stuff, though it's all old Microsoft-space stuff. Spent the morning
preparing: collecting seedlings
for Hebes
and Betula pendula. Into town,
got rid of my seedlings, and to look at the printer:

Presumably you don't need to be a computer expert to see that the thing is out of ink. And
for that I came into town. Went looking for Mike Sorrell, but was told that he had left
round midday. Spent some time looking for plants, and while discussing his disappearance
with Yvonne, he came back. Spent some time looking at the equipment and discussing web
pages with him: he wants to create his own content, which makes sense. I'm trying to make
it as easy as possible to write web content, but I can't see my way past using an editor,
and that seems to be a no-no in the Microsoft space. In any case, we weren't able to
complete the discussion: the doors shut at 16:00, and we hadn't got much done by then.

It wasn't a complete waste of time, though: the Gardens have apparently just completed an
exhibition of Cyclamens, and they had
dozens of plants to give away, still mainly in bloom. Took 7 pots with me, all but one
still blooming better than I have ever managed myself:

We sent Yvonne's defective Canon IXY 200F back to Hong Kong on Thursday. Today I got
a message from the seller: they have received and repaired it already. I'm surprised that
the thing has even made it there by now.

As I had half suspected, it seems that the problem was dust in the lens mechanism. Given
the way Yvonne treats her cameras, that's not surprising: she usually takes them riding with
her. They enclosed some photos, taken with a Panasonic DMC-FT1 purporting to show a scratch
and various places with dust on them. They're probably right, but the photos were so bad
that I couldn't recognize it. The first image is supposed to show a scratch, the other two
dust:

One way or another, that suggests that the Canon is far too sensitive to dust. I was
thinking of a hermetically sealed replacement, but looking at the image quality of the
DMC-FT1, which is “toughened”, I'm having second thoughts.

That's with no restriction on the search. What a broken site! And of course their
lists of digital cameras show only current models. Finally tried their support pages, but even
there I couldn't find it. Maybe this is a perspective-dependent model number, like Canon's:
it differs depending on where you look at it from. Certainly it's no advertisement for
Panasonic.

I've had pretty good network connectivity over the last few months, but today I ran into
more trouble: the modem went into UMTS mode
and stayed there even when I was trying to download large quantities of data. We've seen
that before. It seems to need physical removal and replacement of the modem in the USB
connector. Did that, didn't get connected until the third attempt, and it dropped the
connection immediately. Further investigation showed that the antenna connector had become
dislodged. What horrible flimsy things these USB modems are!

After that, it ran for a few hours, then disconnected for 10 minutes (while I was outside,
so I couldn't check what was going on). And later again things went to hell:

That shows me barely able to contact the next hop, and packet loss was round 50%. Called up
Internode Support and was connected to Tristan
(with whom I have spoken before) almost
immediately—a far cry from my recent experience with TransACT. He wasn't able to do much: things cleared
up almost immediately. He did note the incident and explained how they allocate dynamic IP
addresses: they try to give the same address again, assuming I get connected to the
same server. But there seem to be two servers they could connect to
in Melbourne, and today I got connected
to the other one, so clearly I didn't get the same IP address.

My firefox configuration is the
result of years of bumbling, made easier by the lack of documentation and clear migration
paths. Lately I've noted that the size of headings has changed, for no apparent reason.
And then Jashank Jeremy told me about the “awesome” bar on the new firefox, something
that I don't have.

Do I want it? The name sounds so stupid that it's reason enough not to use it. But it
occurred to me that maybe I'm missing out on something useful too. So how about starting
reconfiguring it from scratch?

Did that, with a new profile called Cold-turkey, and in deviation
from firefox's obfuscatory directory names (can you remember 7v0n6ir5.Default
User, with a space in it?), called the directory Cold-turkey too.
Stopped the instance of firefox, restarted, and... no Cold-turkey profile.
Yes, the directory was there, but not the profile. Further investigation showed that the
file ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini was set to be writable only by root.
No idea why, but I suppose it's to be expected that firefox would ignore such a
problem when trying to write the profile information.

So I set permissions correctly, updated profiles.ini and stopped the instance
of firefox. Started again:

The message is Just Plain Wrong, at least in this case: for some reason, it
had removed the directory. This might have been a race condition with stopping the
instance of firefox, which rewrites profiles.ini. Did it also check the old
version and remove directories that were “no longer needed”? Hard to say, but it fits in
with the “there can only be one” mentality.

I've seen this before. But this time it has a different meaning. How do I get past it?
Somebody gave me this URL, but by that time I was so fed up with this mess that I went out into the
garden to do something useful.

Spring is catching up with me, and I really need to do a lot of work very quickly. So did a
little work: transplanted the last tenacious rose from the east bed to the north bed. I had
tried to remove it once before, but left behind part of the root, and that recovered well.
It has already formed a bud, so it was high time to move it. It's strange to think how many
roses we have, when I consider that we have no particular interest in them: I count 14
different bushes with at least 11 different varieties.

That required a lot of weeding, so did a lot of weeding. Also cleaned out some of the pots
of old, overgrown plants from the greenhouse: these delicate-flowered variegated Japanese
Iris grow like wildfire:

It seems that everybody in the world is commenting on the death
of Steve Jobs. Yes, it's sad, to me
especially since he was considerably younger than I am. But some of the accolades I've seen
tend to confirm the opinions I voiced a couple
of months ago: the computer industry is no longer technology-driven but market-driven.
Steve Jobs managed to market things that others had failed to do. He made a cult out of
mobile phones, something that was beginning to stagnate. He brought out business models
with things like iTunes, really a front
end for the iTunes Store, something
that upsets both free software advocates and people like me who just want a program that
doesn't tell you how to live your life. But he didn't manage to bring out an operating
system that looks the same from the (overly gaudy) GUI and under the
covers: Mac OS X really lives a double
life. But who cares? It sells.

In short, the Steve who turned Apple around and will go down in history as one of the great
innovators of the computer age was the businessman Steve Jobs, not the tech
wizard Steve Wozniak. The days of
real technological innovation are gone.

Today I got round to planting three of the trees:
the Pittosporum (middle left area
of brown grass), the Acacia
merinthophora (middle right, partially behind the Salvia) and
the Choisya ternata (in front
in the middle of the black weed mat).

In passing, it's sad to note that two of the plants we bought
in Pomonala year ago have died:
the Grevillea lavendulacea x lanigera
and the
Eucalyptus macrocarpa. The
former seems almost certainly to have fallen foul of a clogged-up dripper. It brings home
to me how careful I should be to check them all, but that in itself is significant work.
Spent some time looking for the dripper for the Romneya coulteri (also called
Californian Tree Poppy) that we bought in Lambley
Nurserylast December. That's the
recognizable bush just left of the centre of the photo above. It's clearly happy, the soil
is moist, but I can't find the dripper. I really need to ensure that I can find them all
for checking.

I had intended to finally hang wire mesh over the frames in front of the sheds to the
north-east of the garden, but somehow after lunch I ran out of steam.

I have both large areas of ground with nothing (except weeds) on it, and a lot of small
succulents and similar intended to be ground cover. Today I finally got round to solving
the obvious problem. The first issue was the condition of the plants themselves. I had
left them in the greenhouse for months, just pouring water over them and ignoring the weeds.
The result didn't look too bad from about, but from below it was clear that they had used up
all available space, and it was barely possible to tear them apart:

Planting them proved to be more of a problem than I thought: I had many more ground cover
plants than will fit, and the ground is very poor. It used to be the driveway, and what we
have now is mainly poorly drained clay. No wonder
the Lobelias that I planted last year
didn't survive. These ground cover plants are mainly pretty hardy, but decided to leave out
the syntactically
improbable Juniperus squamata.
We'll find somewhere else for that.

We've established that Yvonne's camera problems were due to
dust, and I suspected that the old camera had the same problem. I'm also wondering if the
spontaneous shutdowns on pain, my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop, were not due to
overheating because of dust buildup. To the garage with both camera and laptop and tried
blowing compressed air through them. Nothing very exciting happened. The camera works most
of the time, but it did give up on focusing on one occasion and had to be power cycled—which
presumably could dislodge dust—and the amount of dust that came out of the laptop doesn't
suggest that it was a problem. We can only be sure it has made a difference if it doesn't
shut down after being powered on for days.

I've been in contact with Cartola (Carlos Carvalho), who is very active in panorama photography, especially 360°
panoramas. He was (probably rightly) surprised that I didn't have any web-based software
for interactive display of my panoramas, and pointed me to a couple of programs that help:
Salado Player and
Panini. While searching, came
across another, krpano. Decided to take a look
today. None are in the FreeBSD Ports
Collection, so the first step was to build them.

krpano proved to be a dead loss: it's commercial software. That in itself wouldn't
be reason for rejection, but it's not available for FreeBSD. There's a Linux version, but
that seems to be limited to “command line tools”, whatever that may imply, and if I don't
have the source, I don't want to even try.

Next was Panini. It seems to be part of the pqvt project, and like so many
projects on SourceForge, it doesn't seem
to have any documentation. About all I could find was a file panini-build.txt in the
top-level directory, written one line per paragraph and terminated with \r\n. I had
to reformat it just to read it. When I did, it wasn't very helpful. It
uses Qt, in
particular qmake to build the project. According to panini-build.txt:

What's that? I really don't want to have to learn [a-z]make to build projects. It's
bad enough that we have BSD make and GNU make, but things like qmake
and cmake just don't seem to be worth the trouble. Did a bit of looking around:

I suppose that's to be expected. There is web-based documentation, installed on my machine
as a web page. But it's all too much work.

Moved on to Salado player. I can't complain about the volume of the documentation here,
though it's clearly written by a non-native English speaker. Judging by the lack of
articles, I suspect an Eastern European origin. But the “Quick Start” needs a lot of
digestion, and somehow I don't have the patience for that any more. Put it off until some
other time. I suppose my real concern is that I'll invest a lot of time setting the thing
up, only to discover that there's some showstopper which makes it all a waste of time.

We wanted to eat tacos tonight. Or was that
burritos? It depends on the country, it
seems. On investigation, it seems that in Mexico tacos are made from maize tortillas, and
burritos are made from wheat flour tortillas and really come from round the US
border. But in the USA, “tacos” tend to be hard and possibly deep-fried. In any
case, we wanted food wrapped in soft maize tortillas, so they're tacos in Spanish at any
rate.

I thought we had some filling in the deep freeze, but it turned out we needed to make it,
and we still haven't finished the recipe.
One thing's clear, though: we needed Mexican tortillas. And I still don't have exact proportions for mixing the dough. Here's my
current take: for four tortillas:

Brand

Masa

Water

Maseca

100 g

145 g

Minsa yellow

100 g

160 g

Minsa blue

120 g

155 g

The blue tortillas use much less water, which makes them difficult to press; the result is
thicker, so we need more masa to get the same size. Until proof of the contrary, I'll use
these values.

It rained heavily last night, and we were braced for a power failure. When it finally came, at 1:54, it was
just a short one. Today, though, we had another issue: almost no water. Although I had had
the water tanks cleaned only 9 months ago, and
cleaned the water filter at the beginning of
last month, it was clogged again. Here last month and today:

To make matters worse, when I turned on the pump again, it kept on running and didn't cut
out. Was it leaking? Pressure switch defective? Who knows? I cared, but I didn't have
time, so just turned it off. When I came back some time later to investigate it, it worked
normally. So maybe it was just a legitimate trickle somewhere (hot water tank, maybe?) that
kept it running so long.

It doesn't say so, but it looks as if for FreeBSD I need to set QMAKESPEC to freebsd-g++. Or do I? Maybe
it's linux-freebsd-g++? Yes, looking at the names, freebsd-g++ makes more
sense. But what's the other one for? Why is there no explanation of the two sets of
values? And, in particular, why is there no default? This way every user who wants to
use qmake needs to set QMAKESPEC—to the same value almost every time. What
a mess!

Is that an error or “normal”? I didn't have time to continue. Today was photo day, and
Cartola's discussion of 360° panoramas had me thinking. There's very little missing on my
verandah panorama to make a 360° panorama, so set to taking a zenith shot. That didn't work
as well as I thought: in the process I made the second row too high, so there was no join,
and I had to make a third row in the middle, a total of 111 images of 37 different
viewpoints. On stitching them together, it became apparent that I didn't need all those
images: I could have done them as before with just the additional zenith image. The result
also showed how imperative it is to put the camera directly below the beam in the middle,
which here looks as if it is bent in two to the right:

And the nadir? No idea. What I have at the moment can be summed up by the three panosphere
images. The first is horizontal, roughly corresponding to the image above. The second is
looking down from above, and the third is looking up from below, with a hole in the base
through which the other side is visible:

The problem, of course, is that the tripod is there. How do I get around that? I suppose I
could try removing the camera from the tripod and shooting freehand. In some cases, that
might work, but with the decking it seems unlikely to work here. But I won't know until I
try it—next week.

Once again I've been disconnected from the net. It's standard procedure now to pull the
modem out of the USB slot (more carefully than last time) and replace it. And today that
worked. How I hate flaky USB devices!

Yes, those enormous offsets are valid: they're just shy of the 2 TB size of the disk. But
that proved fatal. lagoon crashed completely. fsck worked—it thinks. I
really need to get my eSATA interface
working. How I hate flaky USB devices!

I've been complaining lately that a set
of NiMH batteries hardly lasts for the 24
shots I need for my verandah panorama. And today there were 36 (no flash for the zenith).
But I didn't take them all at once. After the first 24 images, the recycle time had risen
from 7 to 27 seconds. Then I took the zenith shot, looked at the images, and decided I had
to take the third row of 12 in the middle of the panorama. And suddenly the recycle time
was back under 10 seconds. That was after a rest of only 100 seconds. So it looks as if it
really is the frequency of the shots (and possibly associated heating) which causes the long
recycle time. It'll be interesting to see what happens when I get
my NiZn batteries.

I currently know two families who have trouble with Australian residence. To the best of my
knowledge and belief, they're all respectable citizens. One is a British professional
couple who made the mistake of entering Australia on a tourist visa. The other is an
Australian man and his American wife, along with a child who, though an Australian citizen,
hasn't had his paperwork processed properly. And for pressing financial reasons the family
wants to return to Australia. They've been told that the wife and child will have to wait
up to 9 months to have their visa applications processed.

Maybe the Australian citizen should go
to Bali and get caught buying illicit drugs,
or get his son to do it. That's what a fourteen-year old tourist did. And Australia is up in arms about this poor boy who
did nothing more than break the
law. Kevin Rudd, currently Minister
for Foreign Affairs, was personally involved, and the Australian ambassador personally flew
from Jakarta to Bali to attend to the situation.

On the face of it, it looks as if the Indonesian authorities are handling things
cooperatively. But the fact remains that he has broken a very carefully stated
law. According to the laws of the country, he's a criminal. Why should he get such
preferential treatment? It's not (just) because of his age; we've
seen a number of cases where this has
happened, usually to people over the age of majority, and in each case diplomats and the
media have been up in arms. And after all, it's not as if drug possession is legal in
Australia either. Isn't the fact that 14 year olds are taking drugs enough of a concern,
without appearing to condone it? I'm disgusted.

As usual on Saturdays, didn't have much time for the garden. I really need to put up the
mesh for the climbers in the north-east, but that'll have to wait yet again.
The Solanum laxum needed planting,
though, and since one of
the Jasminum polyanthum round
the arch in the the north bed seems to have died, decided to plant it there, next to
the Mandevilla laxa:

The seeds I planted last month were spectacular
in their failure; out of something like 100 seeds I only have a handful of seedlings, and
they're still tiny. Why? There are several obvious reasons, the most probable of which I
considered to be the temperature and light in the greenhouse. Now I have the shade area, so
decided to try again.

I have used up all my old bag of seed raising mix (from Yates if I recall correctly), so opened a new bag, made by Debco. The difference
in consistency is remarkable: the Debco is much finer that the Yates, something that I
consider positive. There were too many lumps in the Yates mix, and that can't help
germination:

Compiling hugin on FreeBSD is currently a minefield. The latest version has
removed the code for one of the dependencies, tclap. While that's almost certainly the correct thing to do, FreeBSD
currently doesn't have a tclap port, and I don't particularly feel like making one.
So I had to replace the bits in the build tree. The problem there is that a make
clean removes it all again, so it's very fragile.

In addition, Cartola had asked for a binary for amd64, which I'm still
not running on dereel, so brought out the old teevee, the one with the
Ethernet interface damaged by a power surge three months ago. Put in the disk for defake (the amd64 upgrade machine) and an Ethernet
card, but out of habit plugged the cable into the on-board interface, and—it worked! It's
amazing how often “damaged” equipment can recover after a few months. It's also irritating
that I now won't be able to prove to Powercor that the thing was damaged at all.

It turned out that one of the dependencies, libpano13, needed to be updated, which mercifully didn't take too long. And
after a lot of waiting—why does C++ compile so slowly?—finally got it built. This should be
easier.

I finished my amd64 build of the latest version of hugin yesterday, and was going to send it to
Cartola when I remembered the old joke “It builds! Ship it!”. Guilty as charged. So I
tried it out:

=== grog@defake (/dev/pts/1)~1 -> huginThe program 'hugin' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)'.
(Details: serial 233 error_code 2 request_code 142 minor_code 3)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

Not exactly the success story I was hoping for. But this was a remote display,
and hugin uses lots of libraries in which I have dubious confidence. So I tried it
on defake:0, and it started up normally. But I couldn't do anything with it: the
Ethernet interface on this motherboard may be functional again, but the USB system isn't,
and I would have to reboot to get a PS/2 mouse recognized. Not a problem in itself, since
this is a test machine, but I also wanted to bring the system up to date. So I spent the
rest of the day (asynchronously) doing that. Another day's delay in the delivery
of hugin. It's a good thing I'm not being paid for it.

Part of the concept of our garden is to hide unsightly sheds behind wire mesh fences onto
which we've trained creepers. We did one in front of the ex-garage a year ago, but various things have kept me from doing the one in the
north-east of the garden, in front of the dilapidated sheds there. The fun that CJ and
Yvonne had last year was certainly one of the reasons for the
delay, but in the meantime I had thought of easier ways to do it.

That proved remarkably successful. Last year they had wrapped the (quite stiff) wire mesh
over the top of the beams, bent them through 90° and taken them down to the ground, where
they bent it again. Both were quite difficult things to do. But why? There's no need.
Today I nailed the top of the mesh on the side of the beam and down the side posts. The
distance between the posts is a careful metric 2.4 metres, and the mesh is 1.2 metres (also
metric) wide, so this leaves the other side in the middle, where I just tie the two halves
together. That didn't work on one of them, where the wire was already too twisted, so I had
to insert a bamboo rod:

So what do we plant there? Currently we
have Hydrangea petiolaris
(2nd image) and Hibbertia
scandens (third image). This area was originally in the shade of the Cathedral trees, and they're intended for shady
conditions, but that's no longer the case. In fact, there's every reason to believe that we
should move the Hydrangea elsewhere. Currently we have more Jasmine and Lonicera, and maybe
that would work, but we have many of them already. There are also climbing
roses, Hardenbergia
and Clematis, but it's not clear whether
they will thrive in that position. Maybe we should just put in some annuals such
as Tropaeolum,
Sweet pea
and Morning glory for this year.

While checking the history of this fence, found this, written three years ago:

Another thing that hasn't done well are the Morning Glories. Of the four I planted in egg
boxes, two are looking OK, one is looking unhappy, and one appears to have died. On the
other hand, of the 6 that I planted round the arch in the north bed, none seem to have
germinated. Tried another 8 seeds today, 6 round the arch and two in
the Azelea bed in the north-west.
Hopefully we'll have more success there.

Yvonne returned from walking the dog with a small electronic
box that she had found in the forest. It proved to be a Navman GPS N196, a model so old that Navman no longer want to know anything
about it, not even for map updates (in its turn a good reason to avoid Navman). But it works, and I was
able to find a “Home” POI in the maps. That's in Ballarat, so we'll drive past next time
we're in town and see whether it's really theirs. Otherwise Yvonne needs a GPS receiver, so
this could do the trick.

I must find a better word than “fence” for the wire mesh frames I've built for creepers, but
I can't think of one. Today spent some time preparing the ground in front of the north-east
fence, mainly removing the grass that had taken over again, in the process discovering a
lonely Lonicera that I had planted some
time ago but forgot to document, along with a
since-defunct Jasminum
polyanthum planted at the same time. It's tiring work, and I didn't get around to
putting in the weed mat.

I'm truly amazed by the number people who take the death of Steve Jobs as a personal loss.
On Facebook many people have replaced their
photo images with a sad Apple face, and acccolades continue to pour in. But many of these
are the same people who complained about Apple's predatory behaviour, both against its
customers and against its competitors. So many people complained about the locked-down
nature of Apples smaller devices.
Now rmspitches
in, in his typically tactful way, writes
(quoting Harold Washington)
“I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone”. Predictably, many Apple fans are up in
arms, and a number have quoted this
article with the truncated URL by Joe Brockmeier, titled “Why FSF Founder Richard Stallman is Wrong on Steve Jobs”.

Why? He doesn't say. Instead, you can read:

Though I've often disagreed with the tone and language of Stallman's commentary on closed
devices, he makes good points about software freedom.

...

While I'd love it if Stallman would retire, or at the very least improve his social
skills, I hope he lives to be 120. As long as he's alive, there's hope he might
change. I'd never be glad that he's gone.

Those are my excerpts, of course, but I can't see anything else in the article that accuses
him of more than bad taste. Strangely, none of the people agreeing with this article seem
to have noticed this. The title has little to do with the article.

Yet Stallman's critique of Jobs' business model has merit. For all Jobs' focus on
user-friendly devices, Apple's buttoned-down approach to its software and apps, along with
the way its mobile devices facilitate violations of their users' privacy, should be the
subject of much broader concern. Stallman's eulogy may get wide distribution because of
its tone, but his underlying point about the digital world deserves to be heeded.

So why are people so up in arms about the statement? I really don't know. Clearly nobody
will ever convince rms to shut up or to be tactful. And I'm not sure I want him to. As
long as there are people like him
and Theo de Raadt way out there on
the fringes, people like me can feel normal.

While watching TV, tried to look up something on Google, as you do. But this time I got an error message telling me that it wasn't
available. Tried my (local) home page, and was told that it didn't exist. Panic time?

The processes gave the lie to what had happened: I only use pkbzip2 for backups. And
today I had tried to repeat a backup (level 1 dump) that I should have done on Sunday, but
which I had forgotten. I do a daily backup to an external USB disk: a level 0 dump on the
first day of each month, level 1 on Sundays and level 2 on other days. I have a script for
this which does other cleanup functions, mounts the dump disk, calls the dump script and
umounts the disk. This time I called the dump script directly without first mounting the
disk, so it dumped to the root file system.

And yes, indeed, kern.openfiles was at the maximum. But what was doing it? The
kernel's not so good at reporting that. The obvious idea is that it had something to do
with the full file system. Spent a bit of time looking with lsof, and finally found the
culprit: yreport, part of my weather reporting software. Killing that process and
restarting it solved the problem. Is this the cause of the problems I reported
a couple of months ago? In any
case, it's clear that it had a file descriptor leak (in particular, if a write fails), and
it's fixed.

That's fine for humans, but web crawlers follow these links, as Martin finally managed to
make clear to me. And if they do their job exhaustively (they don't), things can really go
crazy. Last month's diary has 164 photos in it.
Each has 4 sizes, so theoretically there are 4¹⁶⁴, or 5.5E98 combinations of image size.

The result has been hit rates of several per second from the crawlers, all looking for the
same page with different image sizes:

What should I do about it? I want the crawlers to index my pages, of course, and I also
want the higher-resolution images to be indexed. The first step is obviously to recognize
the crawlers, which currently I'm doing on an ad-hoc basis:

So: I need to lie to the crawlers. If a crawler asks for a page and specifies sizes, it
gets redirected to the same URL without a size specification. And in that case, it always
gets size “4”. The cached page will reflect that, but the link will return thumbnails.

And the results? Lots of 301 (moved permanently) returns, here in the 7th field of the log
file:

Martin pointed me at apachetop, which monitors real-time performance of the web server. It's
interesting to note the third line, which breaks up the return codes. 17.4% are 2xx, 82.5%
are 3xx (mainly 301, moved permanently).

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the redirect ratio to drop. I note that
the current version of http://narrawin.lemis.com/grog/diary.php on Google is about a week out of
date, so it might take at least that long.

Finally got round to putting down the weed mat in the north garden. This takes forever. A
little investigation shows that
the Lonicera I found yesterday is a
different type from the Lonicera
japonica on the verandah (second image):

I was somewhat lax in writing down details at the time, but it looks as if this was the sole
remaining Lonicera of the 7 we got from Nancy Brewer two years ago. It's amazing how many plants have died before they
were even planted. This one looks happy enough, and I expect it to survive, but it's a good
indication that we shouldn't buy plants before we're ready to plant them.

The Salvia leucantha that we
planted in March bloomed happily through the
winter, and then all but disappeared: another Salvia of indeterminate species, which we
bought at the Dereel market on
Australia Day, had grown so much larger than expected
that it had completely enveloped it. It hasn't flowered yet, and until I can identify it
I'm calling it Salvia diesaustraliae. Spent some time removing much grass from the area,
and also moved the Salvia leucantha about 80 cm to the right:

If the Salvia diesaustraliae makes it that far, we'll have to cut it back.

Ended up with a number of pieces of the Salvia diesaustraliae anyway, and also of the
nearby Tradescantia, and planted
them in pots. What are we going to do with all this stuff?

One thing we did get rid of was the
white Bougainvillea, which belongs
to Chris Yeardley. Yvonne took it over, complete with a
couple of volunteer snapdragons, but she came back with a cutting each of the white and
purple Bougainvilleas. So in total we now have 12 new cuttings. What are we going to do
with all this stuff?

I've made a number of comments about the recent death
of Steve Jobs, and expressed my
surprise about the personal sadness that many felt. Also the reactions
to rms' comments, which my wife
Yvonne found so good that she sent him a personal
congratulation. But what got me the most was how people claimed that Steve was a technical
innovator, a “giant”.

And then today I heard the sad news
that Dennis Ritchie died on
Sunday. And it has taken the world this long to find
out. Rob Pike seems to be the first to
have reported it, less than two hours ago if I interpret Google's time-zone-less time
specifications correctly.

What a comparison! If ever there was a “giant”, it was Dennis. I can't think of any part
of modern computing environment which he hasn't influenced. Most modern compiled
programming languages are either his
own C programming
language, or they're derived from it. His file system design is alive and well today
and forms the basis of almost all modern file systems with the exception of Microsoft.
Everybody who uses a web browser (in other words, everybody) sees the file name conventions
that he developed 40 years ago. And as one of the two main developers
of Unix, he has influenced all operating
systems, even to some extent Microsoft. There's not a single product that Steve Jobs
marketed in the last 20 years that doesn't depend on Dennis' work.

Now there's a giant. Isn't it sad that his passing has gone almost unnoticed? If
ever I needed proof of my claim that the computer world is now market-driven and no longer
technology-driven, the reactions to the deaths of Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie demonstrate
it. Atypically, I feel a deep sense of loss.

The vine on the verandah is also growing happily and sending out shoots in all kinds of
directions that I don't want. Time for more pruning, also removing some errant shoots
from Lonicera,
Hardenbergia and rose—accidentally
including my new rosebud! Still, it's pretty inside the house too.

Spring is progressing, and the greenhouse is emptying. Moved
the Mandevilla to its summer position
in front of the kitchen and laid some drippers for
the Salvias in the north bed, and also
cleaned a dripper on one of the plants between car parking area and house (I think
a Melaleuca). Even the cleanable
drippers are getting clogged up now, and some are easier to clean than others. I must do a
comparison page.

How do I handle my seedlings? I still don't know. But I think that once they've reached
the four-leaf state, they need more sun. Spent some time rearranging; I'll need to keep a
careful eye on things.

Call from Susan Atkinson of ABC 702 Sydney radio, asking if I would do an interview about the death
of dmr on this evening's
“Evenings” program with Robbie Buck. It
seems that she found me by quite a roundabout way: for some reason they rang UniSA and were connected with Ben Close, who put them on
to me. Nothing to do with the messages I sent to various newspapers.

“Evenings” runs from 19:00 to 22:00, and my part was at 21:30, but at the last
minute—apparently after announcing the interview—they postponed. As far as I can tell, some
important sports news had cropped up, and now they're planning it for tomorrow between 20:00
and 21:00.

Shortly after that, the system froze and I wasn't able to reboot. Took it in to the office
and ran fsck on a different machine, where it ran. But I tried to shut down before
the background fscks were finished, with the longest buffer sync output I have ever
seen:

Got it running again, and we watched TV for about 15 minutes before the system died again.
Despite the log messages, everything is pointing to something on the motherboard—and all the
components are only two months old. Looks like another
trip to Geelong tomorrow.

Did some further tests on teevee this morning, and got it to a point where it
wouldn't get through the POST
with nothing connected to the motherboard. There was an extraordinary amount of dust in the
heat sink, so blew that out with compressed air—finally an impressive cloud of dust—but how
did it get in there in only two months? Checked the memory and the display card in
Yvonne's computer, and they were both OK. So: processor,
motherboard or power supply. Dragged out the receipt for the hardware, was about to put the
machine with assembled motherboard into the car when it dawned on me. This wasn't the
machine I bought in August: a week later I gave it to Yvonne and used her old motherboard
for teevee. So not much hope of getting a replacement, though I should check when I
bought the other one.

At MSY in Geelong, discovered a very poor
selection of hardware. In the end bought a AsRock N68VS3 motherboard, a Sempron LE-145, exactly the same components that I bought two months ago. Also Yet Another UPS, and a power supply for $48, more than either
the processor or the motherboard. Why so expensive? That's all that the branch can get.
According to the pricelist, they
have at least 12 cheaper suitable power supplies, starting at $17. But the Geelong branch
can't get them. And even if customers order in advance, they don't get delivered.

I sensed a bit of frustration from the salesman. MSY makes their money by being cheaper.
But if they're not, why should I go there? I had really wanted a dual core CPU, and they
had a couple on the lists, but only the most expensive was available—exactly as I recall it
being the last time. I had already noticed that their disks were more expensive than at
OfficeWorks. Why do MSY do this? Poor
organization? Are they planning to shut the Geelong branch? Certainly counterproductive,
in any case.

Also to Bunnings, this time in a more
direct manner than last year. But
the new, updated maps from naviextrax.com (“our
maps are renowned for their accuracy”) still shows it in the wrong place. Bought various
garden accessories, including some
red petunias—I've given up on getting any
significant number from seed this year.

Back home, put together the new machine. This time the processor is really a Sempron LE-145
and not the Athlon II that I got last time. You couldn't tell from the packaging. Here the
chip of two months ago, then today's:

Brought the machine up, ran fsck and—it hung in exactly the same way as it did last
night. Further investigation showed that it was the
old soft updates bug with
background fsck. Running fsck in the foreground fixed it. All that work for
nothing!

Well, no, probably not. That didn't explain the SIGSEGV last night, nor the fact
that the machine didn't get through
the POST this morning. It
looks very much as if there were two problems: the failing motherboard and the
failing fsck. In any case, the machine ran, though for some reason the NIC is only
running at 100 Mb/s. To be investigated Some Other Time.

The accolades for dmr are pouring
in, as well they should. Today I had my moment of glory with the postponed interview on ABC 702 Sydney radio, and of course they asked me
about Dennis' importance. How do you answer that, especially to an audience of people with
no particular computer background? Yes, I
mentioned Unix, I
mentioned C, like
everybody does.

But for me, the outstanding legacy of Unix is the file system, or at least the underlying
concepts. It's such a masterpiece of simplicity, clarity and power. And nobody really
seems to appreciate it. Certainly those who came after didn't understand the concept of a
directory, or they would never have come up with this silly word folder. Who wrote it? I had always thought it was
Dennis, but not necessarily at the top. But looking at the sources of the
Fourth Edition, it
seems more likely to have been Ken. And at the end of the interview, to bring things home
to the audience, I said “Every time you see a slash in a URL, think of Dennis”. Not as
appropriate as I thought, but I still think it's a nice sentiment.

Apart from such errors on my part, though: who were the really great pioneers of computing?
I had always thought of Ken and Dennis being up on the list, but who's more
important? John von
Neumann? He pretty much defined computer structure, and it hasn't changed that much
until today.
Alan Turing? He was a great thinker,
but it's not clear to me what legacy he has left behind.

Who else? There are plenty of people who have been pivotal in computing, but Ken and Dennis
had not only ability but also the luck to be present at a pivotal time in the evolution of
computing, and to be allowed to do things right rather than do things by the end of the
quarter. I can't think of anybody else who has had so much influence. It's nice to see
that gradually modern systems are gradually discovering facets of their work that had eluded
them before. To quote Henry
Spencer:

House photos again today, the once in a month variety with additional views. And somehow I
managed to mess things up right royally: set the focusing rails to the wrong position, took
the wrong number of images for some shots. Fortunately I recognized the problems in time,
but it cost me a lot of time, kept me going all day, and by the evening I hadn't finished.

The weather wasn't as good as yesterday, but the main issue why I didn't do much in the
garden was the house photos. I was going to plant some of the
new Petunias in the north-west bed, but
it looks as if it might be too shady there, so in the end only planted the one mystery
seedling from the seeds I planted three months ago, the one that should have been
a Viola (plant):

It has grown quite a bit since that photo was taken at the beginning of last month, but the
last couple of the days in the sun didn't suit it, as witnessed by slight browning of the
leaves, so it's a good candidate for the north-west bed. It also needed planting: despite
being planted into quite a large pot, it was already root bound. It appears to have
small, forget-me-not-like flowers,
but they're not visible at the moment:

Is this Anchusa
capensis? I planted some at the same time, but I can't find a good description
anywhere. The nickname “Cape forget-me-not” suggests at least the same kind of thing.
We'll see.

Apart from that, planted yet more sweet peas to climb up the new fence, and also cut down a
whole lot of Tropaeolums that are
trying to take over to the north and immediate south of the verandah. The cuttings are a
problem: if I put them on the compost, I'll end up with Tropaeolums everywhere. On the
other hand, they're quite a good mulch, and Yvonne wanted some
more Tropaeolums round Nemo's run, so put them there.
They probably won't have enough seeds to produce new plants, but it wouldn't harm if they
did, and it'll help reduce evaporation.

So teevee is working well enough with the new hardware, it seems. But I still don't
have the gigabit Ethernet running. Did a little investigation, and it seems that FreeBSD doesn't believe that the chip set can do gigabit
Ethernet:

It wasn't until I checked the specs, though, that the truth came out: Asrock make two very similar motherboards, the N68-VGS3 and the
N68-VS3.
The instruction manual applies to both, but I have the N68-VS3, and the main difference
between the two boards is that only the N68-VGS3 does gigabit Ethernet. OK, the motherboard
only cost $45, but I'm still surprised that the gigabit technology makes any significant
price differential.

The results were almost immediate: many more flowers. The north bed in particular is
looking very spring-like. Roses are blooming, the “Mexican something” that Sue Morse gave
me last year has also produced the first flowers, and
the Solanum laxum that Yvonne brought back as cuttings only a few months ago is also flowering:

Other flowers have been coming for a while, and have more or less arrived. The dwarf
white Alstroemerias have been
flowering for a few days, but the normal-sized orange ones are preparing for an explosion
soon. Our Cymbidium orchid and
our Camellia japonica are also
flowering for the first time:

The flowers of both the Camellia and the Cymbidium are less than I had expected. I'm
wondering if I haven't used enough fertilizer. But how much is correct? Too much and you
damage the plants; too little and they don't grow properly. Some form of feedback would be
good.

The newer Clematis “Vagabond”, already
two years old, is now beating the older one to flowering, and we also have a number of bulbs
that I must have planted in the autumn, but which I don't recall:

Chris Yeardley over this afternoon to talk about installing FreeBSD on her new laptop. She has a class assignment to
contribute to some “open source” project, and of course I encouraged her to do it with FreeBSD.

Chris isn't ready yet to take the plunge and install the ultimate anti-virus, FreeBSD alone
on the disk. So how do you install FreeBSD as one boot option on a laptop? Well, I wrote
the book, but that was years ago, and in general I
don't do dual boot. It seems that Microsoft now allows partitions to be resized, but I
don't know the details.

It proved that she had four MBR partitions on the disk already. Microsoft reports:

What does that all mean? Two partitions are “primary”, which is clear enough. D:
is a “logical drive”. But then, C: is too: it isn't a real drive. Is this
Microsoft's obfuscation for
“logical partition”?
Probably; at any rate, it was a logical partition (in an extended partition). That's
a problem, because it's half the disk. Sure, I could remove it and replace it with a
primary partition, but that's all that's left on the disk, and Chris doesn't really need 400
GB for FreeBSD.

Did some thinking and decided, at least for the moment, that Chris could connect an external
USB drive and use that as the FreeBSD partition. Played around with that, enough to
discover that the laptop has two different kinds of USB connectors: the ones on the right
didn't seem to work, but the ones on the left did. Later noted that the ones on the right
have blue markings on the socket, which
indicates USB 3.0. But I thought they
were compatible. I wonder if this is an issue with this particular laptop or its design.
Or maybe it's just the bug that I swear crawled out of the laptop (on the right in the first
photo):

While watching TV in the evening, teevee froze again. I've replaced everything
except the memory, which I had tested separately. Is it really the memory? Or something on
the disk? The latter seems unlikely, since I wasn't using it. To be observed.

Yesterday I did a complete series of photos for the critical verandah panorama, with the
exception only of the zenith shot, and then discovered that I had my focusing rail set to
8.0 cm instead of 7.2. Based on previous experience, that should have been a complete
failure. But it was worth investigation, so tried stitching it together.

Surprise! “Very good fit”. In fact, better than the one taken with the correct
settings—not because of the settings, but because the software had chosen some control
points in leaves and things that moved between shots. The results look almost identical
except for the height:

And yes, that wood covering the entire top of the second image is the beam directly above
the camera. It's just a single straight piece of wood.

In the past I had had much more difficulty lining up the images, and I had assumed that the
rail needed to be set with sub-millimetre accuracy. But what has changed since then is that
I have processed the raw images with Olympus
“Viewer”, including distortion correction. So maybe that's the answer.

Also tried making panoramas of the images I took
in Bergensix
years ago. Clearly I had no intention then of stitching them together, and I wasn't
even sure how close together they were taken. But they, too, were surprisingly good, “good
fit”. Just the exposure was a little difficult:

And the voltage? As delivered, they had a voltage of 1.73 V, significantly higher than
the nominal 1.6 V or 1.65 V, but interestingly identical with the value in
Wikipedia. But first I had to charge them. The charger came with instructions of
above-average length and typical accuracy:

On the left “Safety features: Will not charge Non[sic]-Nickel Zinc
rechargeable batteries”. In the middle: “ATTEMPTING TO CHARGE OTHER TYPES OF BATTERIES MAY
CAUSE PERSONAL INJURY AND DAMAGE TO THE CHARGER” (no mention of the presumed destruction of
the batteries).

Charging was made more difficult by the fact that the charger came with an American-style
plug which didn't quite seem to adhere to the standards. I have lots of chargers like that,
along with lots of adapters, but this one didn't fit most of them. Found one that sort of
fitted, but the charge light didn't go on. Searched further and finally found one
that had a snug fit. Still no charge light. I was about to give it up as a defective
charger when I found a strip of plastic between the batteries (which were supplied in the
charger) and the positive side of the charger. Now why didn't they document that?
After removing it, they charged properly. And the voltages? It seems that all batteries
have a nominal voltage that is really only nominal. Here NiMH (nominally 1.2 V),
normal alkaline batteries (nominally 1.5 V) and NiZn (nominally 1.6 V or
1.65 V, depending on whom you ask):

Can that be right? This is a cheap multimeter, and it would be reasonable to question its
accuracy, though my suspicion is that the chips in modern multimeters are accurate enough.
On a suggestion of Peter Jeremy, located
a Mercury battery (in my
Pentax Spotmatic). They have very
stable voltages, but what? Most sources say 1.35 V, which seems too round a figure to
be acceptable. In one place I read 1.355 V, which at least
has more decimal places. My multimeter showed 1.360 V, less than 0.4% higher than the
latter value, so I assume that the other voltages are also correct.

Is that too much? I put some in my power-hungry Nikon “CoolPix” L1, and it seems happy with them. The voltage of the NiZn battery in
the example is shortly after charging. I put it in my old Garmin GPS receiver (bought in
1997) and let it search the sky for satellites. It took half an hour: the internal clock
was off by 40 minutes, and there's no way to reset it. This device has a particularly heavy
battery consumption—it uses a set of alkaline batteries in about 3 hours—so the 30 minutes
should have shown a significant consumption. But at the end of that time, the voltage was
still 1.809 V, a far cry from the nominal voltages. Of course, looking at the voltages
of a normal new alkaline cell, it's clear that all devices should be able to accept a
voltage of 1.6 V, but this is higher still. I'm still not game to put them in my
Mecablitz 58 AF-1. I should find a couple of other things to try first.

In the course of the morning, discovered I couldn't
access teevee—again! Brought it into the office and recovered things
and watched it for a while. No particular problems. But I've changed everything except the
memory, so swapped that too with Yvonne's computer. We'll
keep an eye on it, but so far there have been no further crashes.

There's another irritating thing with teevee: since the new motherboard, I no longer
get remote syslog messages. They're very useful if something crashes, and the only
way I saw the disk errors last week. Why
did they stop? Did a lot of playing around and discovered that it would work if I
restarted syslogd (newsyslog wasn't enough). Somehow it must be related to
the Ethernet interface, but I don't see how.

Then I discovered that cvr2 was down too! To the cupboard where I keep it, and
discovered it happily running—only the network switch was powered off. It seems that that
happened while I was playing around trying to charge
the Nickel-Zinc
batteries. teevee is on that switch too, so probably this time it didn't crash;
but it did yesterday, so that's not overly relevant.

But why an ENXIO? If the file system is already mounted, I should
get EBUSY (“device busy”). And fsck should have at least said NO
WRITE at the beginning. And none of that explains why the file system was mounted in
the first place. The fact that fsck didn't find any errors at all suggests that it
had been umounted cleanly.

It proves to really be
a Pseudofumaria alba, and it
has produced a number of self-seeded seedlings (how come all these plants can do it and I
can't?), so planted some of them. The shade area is gradually filling up.

Another fund-raising call from a charity today, Sids and Kids. I asked why they called me when I'm on the “do not call list”.
They're allowed to, of course, according to the rules for the do not call list, but as I've
observed, why annoy people you want money from? They're now on my “do not donate” list.

There's a question, of course: how do you find out whether somebody is on the “do not call”
list? If I were to want to do this kind of advertising, how do I find out who not to call?
I suppose that's worth investigating. Hypothetically charities don't have access to the
list, but that sounds stupid.

So far my experiences with
the Nickel-Zinc batteries
have been quite positive. But can I use them in my flash unit? Metz didn't say “don't use them”, just
that they can't (yet) recommend them. What do other people say? Searched the web
(something I should have done before buying the batteries) and came up with:

Also I'd be very cautious about putting them in a Mecablitz 45. These have different
circuits for alkalines and rechargeables: the first assumes a high internal resistance
and the second assumes 1.2V per cell.

There's no substantiation for this claim. You'd think it would be easier to design a
product around the thermal limits. Anyway, it refers to a specific model, not mine.

There have been a number of reports in the net, but so far only one person has ruined
his flash unit. Everybody confirms the faster recycle time.

Still, the more practical information, the better. I wouldn't doubt that you can
damage your flash unit if you fire as fast as you can until the batteries are empty.
But that should be possible with power packs too.

The last comment is interesting. The 58 AF-1 has an optional power pack that can give
recycle times of 2.5 seconds instead of the 5 seconds that they claim for NiMH batteries
(which in my experience is closer to 6 seconds). What does the instruction manual say?

On page 85 (beginning of English section), under “Safety instructions” we have:

When taking a series of flash shots at full light output and with the rapid recycling
times possible with NiCad/NiMH battery operation, make sure to wait for at least 10
minutes after 15 flashes. Otherwise, the flash unit will be overloaded.

When taking a series of flash shots at full light output and with rapid recycling times,
and with zoom positions of 35 mm and less, the diffuser heats up, due to the high level of
thermal energy. To protect itself from overheating, the flash unit will automatically
increase the recycling time.

These two statements appear to contradict each other. If the flash unit protects itself
from overheating diffusers, surely it'll do the same for other components. And there's no
mention of the power pack, which suggests that, like so many “Safety instructions”, it's
mainly boilerplate.

On page 87 there's more information:

To protect the flash unit from thermal overload when connected to the Power Pack, a
monitoring control increases the recycling times during heavy usage.

Now it's possible that this monitoring circuitry only works when the power pack is
connected. But why would they do that? It has to be in the unit itself, and if it's there,
it makes sense to have it enabled all the time. And maybe that is the reason why my
recycle times increase during the verandah panorama shots: it's not the batteries, it's the
flash unit protecting itself. That would also explain why the recycle time recovered after
a minute or so of inactivity the weekend
before last.

So: let's try it. I did so, and got recycle times which almost scared me: instead of 6
seconds, they were more like 2.4 seconds. Let's hope that I'm right in my assumption that
the power pack circuitry will protect the unit.

I had intended to plant lots of plants, but in the end only managed to put in irrigation and
plant more creepers round the north-east
fence: Lonicera, a
not-very-happy Trachelospermum
jasminoides, a single sweet pea and
some Tropaeolum. The Trachelospermum
looked happy enough above ground, but below it doesn't have much in the way of roots. I had
planned to plant a second one, but I'll wait until it's more established.

I'm not at all clothes-conscious: I wear the same kind of clothes year in, year out. I've
used the same cheap leather belt for over 10 years, something that surprised me. It wasn't
expensive, but it was extremely durable, and in the end it was the buckle that gave up.
Yvonne found a new one for me that started to disintegrate
within a few days, but then ALDI had a
pair of belts on
special offer, so she bought them.

The weather in the last few days hasn't been particularly warm. Only 3 days ago the highest
temperature was 16°, but since then things have changed:

Today we hit 30.7°, the highest temperature in nearly 7 months and thus the highest since I
completed the greenhouse. Obviously I kept the shade cloth on all day,
and the temperature rose to “only” 31°—previously I've had it hit 40°.

But the weather brings home to me that I still don't understand how to keep plants happy,
particularly seedlings. In the shade area I have put some plants outside in front of the
shade cloth, and that's clearly too hot for many of them. Did some more rearrangement. I
had intended to plant out some of our plants, but it's too warm. Instead spread some
fertilizer—I suspect I have been too stingy in the past—and got rid of about 4 kg.

Yvonne was braver: despite the heat, she mowed the lawn, at
least what she could do with the ride-on mower. Now I need to finish the job with the hand
mower, which will be a lot of fun.

That puts paid to a number of the seeds that I have been trying to raise for the last couple
of months. Almost nothing has grown. What frustration!

As if that wasn't enough, the tree chompers are back. I no longer think it's the kangaroos,
but I'm not sure what it is. All that's left of our recently
planted Acacia merinthophora
is the little stick in the middle of the image:

Others haven't developed as well, though, including
the Leucospermum
cordifolium. It's not looking unhappy, just unchanged, and it's been there for nearly a
month. Decided that the problem could be the wind, so Yvonne bought some wind protection to put around a number of them, which should also foil the
tree-chompers:

Once upon a time TV was easy. You turned on a TV, found a channel and watched it. Then
video tapes came, and you could record things, so you were independent of the broadcast
time. Then pre-recorded tapes came, and with them licensing restrictions, notably the
“don't copy” restriction which I personally find stupid. I can understand that the license
holder wants to sell as many copies as he can (though nowadays they don't necessarily try),
but that's only indirectly related to copying.

Nowadays it's DVDs
and Blu-ray with all their stupid copy
protection, which really only upsets the innocent, while the pirates know enough to
circumvent the issues. I generally stick to the license agreements, but it's not always
easy. Last week I borrowed some DVDs from the Geelong regional library and tried to
play them (on my computer). No go. It didn't play in a normal DVD player either. Looking
at the DVDs, it's understandable why:

That's the worst of them, of course, but it looks like some previous borrower has given them
to their very young children to play with. And yes, there's no hope for this DVD. But
others are recoverable. I've found that the FreeBSD program recoverdisk does a reasonable job of recovering a disk image,
if you first try to play it with mplayer to unlock
the CSS keys. After
that, mplayer can play the DVD image.

What are the ethics of this? The tiny print on the back of the DVD package (black on dark
green) states:

WARNING: The copyright proprietor has licensed the film (including he soundtrack)
comprised in this digital video disc for home use only. All other rights are reserved.
Any unauthorised copying, editing, exhibition, renting, exchanging, hiring, lending,
public performance, diffusion, and/or broadcasts[sic] of this digital video disk or
any part thereof is strictly prohibited. This DVD disk is compliant with applicable
DVD specifications. Some of its features may not be compatible with all DVD players.

Now what does that mean? On careful examination, I conclude:

There's no definition of “unauthorised”. In particular, I got this DVD from the
library, which definitely comprises “lending”. Since this is done all the time by the
libraries I know, I assume it's “authorised”. What else is authorized?

What is “copying”? They don't actually mention “playing” in this license, though
arguably “playing” is a form of copying. The only issue is whether it's copied directly
to the output or via the intermediate step of storing the data on disk. My application
is “home use”, so I assume that this is acceptable.

There's no mention there of any restriction on what kind of device the DVD may be
played on, just what kind it can be played on. So computers should be
acceptable.

What features may not be compatible with all DVD players? Don't purchasers have a right
to know if some obscure feature may stop it from playing in a standards-compliant DVD
player? Reading elsewhere (this time in marginally more legible white on dark green) I
see:

This NTSC Region 4 DVD will play in ALL DVD video players in Australia but the viewing
television monitor must have NTSC & PAL (multi-standard) viewing capabilities.

NTSC? Why NTSC? This is a region 4 DVD
sold in Australia by the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation. And in Australia the standard
is PAL. What earthly reason do they have
to master the DVD in NTSC, which has a lower resolution and is only available to some
people? It's not the origin, which is British (also PAL). I'm both baffled and
marginally offended.

One way or another, the definitions are too difficult to interpret. They're not
designed to annoy honest people like myself, but they do a very good job. Too many laws
address secondary actions: “prohibit what we can control” rather than “prohibit what
causes us harm”. That's particularly stupid here, because they can't control it either.
And efforts to do so cost more than the potential damage.

This is probably not the only restriction on DVD usage. But it's the only one on this
DVD package, so it has to be complete.

I should have planted my potatoes two months ago. I hadn't planned to put any tomatoes in
the veggie patch, but looking at the ones in the greenhouse, I think it might be a good
idea.

Problem with potatoes: it's so late in the season that we can't get any seed potatoes. I
kept some over from last year, but somehow they disappeared. So what should we do? One
option is “nothing”. There are already lots of potatoes sprouting there:

That makes a mockery of the idea of crop rotation: how do you get rid of the old crops? I
could have dug these out more carefully, but we've found the problem elsewhere too. In the
medium succulent garden there's a potato that keeps coming back every year from under the
succulents. We didn't plant it, so it's been there at least five years.

But we did want more, so we took some normal potatoes from the supermarket—Kipfler, Desirée
and Nicola—and I planted half of them in the bald patches in the front. The other half I'll
leave to dry out for a week as recommended by the Clever Books. Normally that would make
sense, but this late in the season every day counts. We'll see which do better.

Why is that? Too hot? Too dry? Clearly I haven't got the knack of greenhouse gardening
yet. About the only thing that has done well is the Black Cherry Tomato that I accidentally
decapitated as a seedling. I must have done that some time in April, but didn't mention it
in my diary. By the beginning of June it had
recovered enough to develop new leaves (first photo), and now it's like in the second photo:

Planted a total of 7 plants in the garden: three “Riesentraube”, the black cherry, a “giant
tree tomato” and two that didn't have any label, but which appear to be normal cherries,
already bearing unripe fruit. In the process found dozens of snails; I'll need to keep an
eye on them.

And I still haven't planted the petunias
I bought in Geelong last week. Made a start
today: three in a hanging basket and five in the north bed, on the side facing the Japanese
Garden. Once I have the rest of the bed weeded, I'll plant a whole lot more. Also another
hanging basket with pelargoniums.
The ones from last year looked pretty sad, so I've trimmed them right back and added some
new cuttings.

Preparing various Indian food for dinner tomorrow, in the process revising my recipes for
mixed dal. Also went through and reorganized
the recipe folder, which has lots of old stuff going back decades. The oldest I have found
so far is Khubab Hans, an Indian goose
recipe that I originally published on the Tandem mail system 27 years ago. How things have
changed since then!

Today was garden photo day, and the first time that I did the verandah panorama using
Nickel-Zinc batteries in the
flash unit. Everything went well for the first 20 flashes or so. The recycle time was
under 3 seconds the whole time (with NiMH
batteries it's between 5 and 6 seconds). Then the unit didn't recharge. Looking at the
display, it showed a flashing
symbol. Low battery already? I waited a few seconds, but there was no change, and since I
didn't really need the flash for the last few images, I just took them anyway.

After I had finished, took the batteries out. After that many photos, NiMH batteries get
very warm, but these were not noticeably warmer than the surroundings. After charging last
week they were at about 1.9 V. Before starting this morning, they showed voltages of 1.791,
1.802, 1.813 and 1.817 V. After the photos, they showed voltages starting at 1.730 V and
going to 1.742 V—not, it seems, a difference in the batteries, but that they were
recovering. An hour later they showed voltages round 1.765 V. I put them back in the flash
unit, and it worked normally, again with recycle times a little over two seconds.

What does that mean? Certainly the batteries aren't discharged. The nominal voltage is 1.6
V or 1.65 V, depending on whom you ask. And the 1.73 V correspond exactly to the
“Electrochemical open circuit voltage potential” mentioned on the Wikipedia page, whatever
that might mean.

So why did the symbol light
up? It's reasonable to assume that it means “low battery”, but it could also mean “waiting
for unit to cool down”. What does the manual say? Yes, according to the manual it really
does mean “low battery”, only. That's not a foregone conclusion: it would be reasonable to
assume that the symbol
means “batteries exhausted”, but in fact it means “You have connected the external battery
pack, and there are still batteries in the unit itself. Please remove them”. On the other
hand, there's no indication for the cool-down phase described in the manual, so it's quite
possible that this really did mean “cooling down”, and nobody has bothered to document it.

So: what happened? Based on my experience with NiMH batteries, I had half expected the
cycle time to increase round this point to let the unit cool down, and this could be exactly
what happened. The only thing that confused me was the battery display, which could have
occurred on other occasions. Next week I'll wait and see what happens.

Our second grapefruit has fallen off the tree. That's an average of 0.8 fruit per tree per
year since we planted our first grapefruit a
little over three years ago. And as a pink grapefruit, it's a total failure:

With the spring come the aphids—very
selectively. We have lots of roses, but only the Iceberg roses on the south side of the
verandah have been affected by aphids. And in the greenhouse, now that
the bougainvilleas have gone home
to Chris, the only thing to be affected was the
one Chile poblano plant that I have
managed to grow from seed:

I'm left with the impression that they don't like the wind much: both places they have
settled are relatively wind-free. At least one advantage we have from the windy situation
here. But that can't be the only reason:
our Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
is now in bud, not far from the chile, and it hasn't been affected—yet.

The Zephyranthes candida
(“Peruvian swamp-lily”) that we bought last February bloomed happily last summer, but this year it's looking a little
dejected. Further investigation shows that it has generated so many bulbs that there's no
space for the soil:

When it comes to installing FreeBSD, I wrote
the book. I've been doing it on a regular basis
for over 15 years. So today when Chris Yeardley wanted to install FreeBSD, it should have
been a breeze, right?

Well, no. She downloaded a DVD from the web and burnt it herself, and her laptop told her
it wasn't bootable. So she sent it over along with a USB disk drive to install to. That
requires a dedicated machine (or a VM, which I didn't even want to try). And only three
machines have DVD drives: dereel, teevee and Yvonne's computer, lagoon. Did a bit of investigation and found an old
Hyundai machine that CJ had left here after another case of Powercor damage which left the
motherboard dead. It has 2 DVD drives in it. But how do you get them out? Hyundai seem to
have gone to some trouble to make it difficult to work on:

There's a plate riveted to the frame in the front of the side plate. Why? I later
discovered that you can remove the front panel relatively easy and access the drives from
there, but by then I had given up and tried a different tack.

There are other issues, of course: after installation, you have a basic system. I already
have a build disk with all the ports I need, which would be a much better starting point for
Chris. Fired up my test machine, and was quickly reminded that Powercor had put paid to the USB bus three months ago. In addition, the Ethernet NIC is now not working
any more. OK, not a worry; just put the USB drive on teevee and copy across the net.
Started updating to the latest version, which took the rest of the day.

Today Yvonne picked up a USB stick from Helen Vincent with a
draft of the Spring edition of Wellingtonia. Helen uses Apple “Pages”, and in the past we've had significant problems understanding it. In this
case, she was unable to send me a copy of the document by email, because it proved to be 26
MB in size, and her ISP has a hard limit of 20 MB. How do normal computer users move files
around? She could upload them to the server, of course, but she doesn't know how to
use scp.

Thus the USB stick. And stupidly, I asked for the file only in “Pages” format, and not in
anything that would show me the layout (such as PDF). I was completely blown away by what I
found, after breaking up the single line of the document before every < character:

Clearly that's not what Helen wrote, but it goes on like this for half the document. And
it's not as if I haven't seen lorem
ipsum before and commented on the meaningless and incorrect syntax. But I didn't know
what it meant. Now I know: “pain itself”, in accusative, and missing the first syllable
(should be “dolorem ipsum”). Somehow that's appropriate. It reminds me of the story of the
Microsoft TV commercial with music from
Mozart's Requiem, which in the original
had the words “Confutatis maledictis flammis acribus addictis” from
the Dies irae.

Looking further, I found the real text, along with a couple of punctuation issues (primarily
excessive spaces, something that WYSIWYG
software almost encourages). But I couldn't make any sense of the document. And though
there were some normal-sized images, there were still had lots of tiny images:

But I recognized at least one of these photos. It's the one I investigated a couple of
months ago. This is the original size, so there's no point trying to enlarge it:

But what about these?

It seems that “Pages” carries around so much excess baggage with it that it's impossible to
work out what belongs and what doesn't. “Pages” doesn't solve problems, at least not for
me. It would be easier to write the thing from scratch in groff than help Helen with
this software.

But why was the document so big? By the time I got it, it had grown to 66 MB. Not all the
images were tiny. Looking at the index, I found:

While writing my diary for yesterday, discovered I could no longer reformat paragraphs.
Stopped Emacs, restarted it, no change. Then I discovered that the q key
wasn't working, and the command is bound to M-Q.

You can get keyboards almost anywhere, and they're not expensive. They're also not what I
want. For me at least, the keyboard is the most important interface to the machine, and it
must be exactly the way I want. In particular, that means not having to look at the
keyboard when typing (thus the complete unsuitability of touch pad keyboards). But you need
to look at a keyboard to find the function keys in their current position, somewhere off the
top of the main keyboard.

The only ones I've found that I can find without looking for them are to the left of the
main keyboard, the way IBM made them until the late 1980s. And that's what I have been
using for the last 20 years. The best keyboard I ever had was a Northgate OmniKey, and I
still have four or five of them, but they're all 20 years old and in rough condition. The
one I was using now was a flaky copy, the Avant Stellar. I have two of those, so I put the
other one in. It worked for a while, but then the Ctrl key stopped working, which is
even worse.

Found an OmniKey which looked as if it was OK, along with a cable, and that seems to work
better, but a number of keys bounce. It's interesting to note the failure mode: the
OmniKeys develop bounce, and the Avant Stellar, ostensibly a direct copy, suffers from key
failures.

But this is stupid! Why should I be using any 20 year old component? Why can't I buy a
modern keyboard? Did a bit of searching, but I couldn't find any. I can see some soldering
coming my way.

Ran my photo backup today. I write to an external disk, and until I
get eSATA working properly, I've been using
a USB connection. And from time to time the system (Yvonne's lagoon) freezes up. On one occasion it has reported I/O errors before doing so,
but on others there has been no indication of why. Today I finally finished fsck and
found 4 files in lost+found, so deleted them (the backup will put them back in the
correct place), and—the system froze again!

Why do I have so much trouble with USB? Why do I even try? Put the eSATA card
in defake and ran the backup from there. It works fine if you boot with the disk
connected, but hot plug still doesn't seem to work. High time that I completed some of the
upgrade projects I've been planning.

It was really hot again today. Last year the highest temperature in October was 28.8°, but
a few days ago we had 30.7°. For today the Bureau of Meteorology predicted 24°, but in fact we had a maximum of 31.7°. Hopefully that's not a sign of a
coming Long Hot Summer.

Finally got round to replanting
the Zephyranthes candida.
There must have been 150 bulbs, and I ended up planting them in three different pots, the
original and two with double the diameter. It's interesting to note the roots on the bulbs:
some seem to be rotting away, while others look quite healthy. Here the same bulb before
and after removal of the rotten ones:

I've been taking my time with the installation of FreeBSD on Chris Yeardley's USB disk. The last status was that I had copied all the
data across—I think. I had turned off the machine before checking. Today I fired it up
again and discovered some serious issues with the disk partitioning: c
partition went beyond the bounds of the slice, probably a result of trying to copy the
partition exactly from the other system, where the slice was larger.

So, blow it away and start again. Not a problem. Or was it? The partition table included
3 partitions: a and d, both 20 GB, and e,
the rest of 1 TB. But the slice was only 256 GB, so I first removed
partitions d and e. Then I tried to create a new
partition d with the rest of the slice. “Operation not
permitted”. ktrace shows that it happens on an open call:

Tried removing partition d and rewriting the label, but the rewrite failed.
So I disconnected the drive, and the system (teevee, no monitor) froze.

Put the drive in lagoon while teevee was running fsck, and all went
well. The rest was plain sailing, apart from the time it took to copy the ports tree, with
multiple work directories, a total of about 25 GB. Finally I can give the drive to
Chris. But there's something seriously wrong with USB disk support—maybe it's with disk
support in general. This one suggests that some kernel copies of disk data don't get
flushed at the right time.

I've been running ceeveear with three tuners for over a week now. Time for the USB
tuner to give up on me, and indeed it did. One recording hung up completely. I caught it
in the middle, shut down cvr2 (which runs Linux, where I haven't been able to work
out how to hot-plug USB devices), unplugged the tuner and continued (recording on the first
of the PCI tuners). The remainder of the recording wasn't particularly good, but it was
readable. Why do I have so much trouble with USB? It's not the operating system, and it's
not a specific device. I don't like blaming the technology, but there's a good reason to do
so here.

Helen Vincent sent me a copy of the newsletter draft in PDF format today. What a disaster!
I really, really don't understand what's going on here, and I'm not sure that I want
to. So far we have been blaming the low resolutions on the low resolution images stored in
the document, but that's clearly not the only issue. Here's an image as extracted from the
document with unzip, and the way it looks in the PDF:

That's original size in each case. But the quality! Looking at the bird on centre left,
the already low resolution image has been made much worse:

Yesterday we had the highest temperature I have recorded in October, 31.7°. Today was
completely different. The temperature at midnight was 18.8°, and it dropped almost
continuously from there, reaching 6.3° round the next midnight:

At 16:00 yesterday, the temperature was 31.7°. At the same time today, it was over 22°
lower:

I've been becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Popular Photography magazine, and had planned not to renew. But then they made me an
offer I couldn't refuse, 18 issues for only $12, postage paid. As it says, $0.67 per issue:

But I couldn't accept it either. What's the reply-by date? 10 September 2011? 11
September 2010? 9 October 2011? Whichever it is, it is long past. That's not the fault of
long postage times, though: looking at the envelope, the letter was sent from Belgium only 4
days ago:

So what's the point? Looking more carefully, there's no way to accept online—the voucher
has to be sent in. The offer expired at least 11 days before it was sent. And it's not
$12, it's $29.93, only barely cheaper than the standard subscription. And if I accept it, I
suspect I'll also be locked in to the $30 a year subscription, where currently I'm only
paying $22. I'm left with the impression that this is a deliberately deceptive move to try
to get me to renew when I don't want to.

Another cool day, and didn't do much in the garden. A couple of things were of interest,
though: ten days ago I pulled out a lot
of Tropaeolums and put them round
Nemo's run as mulch. Admittedly I had half expected
some of the seeds to sprout and produce new flowers, but what happened really surprised me.
The “mulch” is flowering as if it hadn't been uprooted. It's all the more surprising
because on the other side (first photo) there are some Tropaeolum that have been planted
normally, and they're not doing as well:

Over to Chris Yeardley's today with the USB disk for her Samsung RF511 laptop. In principle
it should have been “plug in, frob a couple of config files, and we're done”. But it didn't
work like that. First, the laptop has big problems with—wait for it—USB. I'm not
sure why, but in many cases it didn't recognize the drive. We thought it might be a problem
with the cable or one of the slots, and moving things around seemed to help, but even then
it doesn't honour the boot sequence (first USB, then DVD, then internal disk) unless I first
go into the BIOS and then out again.

All went relatively well until I tried to start X. Then I saw a message I've never seen
before:

Number of created screens does not match number of detected devices.
Configuration failed.

Investigation of the configuration file showed that it apparently has two screens, strangely
with an nVidia "GF106 [GeForce GT 555M SDDR3]"
and an Intel "2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller";
presumably the latter is just a consequence of the choice of processor. But the real issue
seems to be that this chip is too new:

Tried it with the proprietary nVidia driver, but that froze the system. Isn't proprietary
software nice? Started loading the latest version of
the driver, but it was via satellite at 8 kB/s, and it would have taken over an hour, so we
put it off until tomorrow.

As a result of the problems with rebooting Chris' laptop, I was presented with the
“Windows” 7 boot screen for the first time. They've
done away with the broken window emblem and the “my display panel is broken” bloom that
earlier versions used, and instead introduced a number of scratches on the surface. I
wonder if I'm the only person who sees it that way, or whether even somebody in Microsoft is
doing it as some kind of joke.

It's gradually becoming clear that my purchase of the Manfrotto 303PLUS panorama head was a mistake. It's full of strange baroque “features”, but it doesn't do
what I want: it's designed to take photos only in vertical orientation and with the lens
axis pointing horizontally. In addition, the leveling base is a real pain, and I still need
to adjust the tripod legs in many cases. About the best thing about it is its resale value,
so I should realize that.

But what do I replace it with? Did some searching on eBay and came up with a number of new brackets, all from Linkdelight. They're not an unknown company:
six months ago I was looking at a bracket from
them, and decided that it was designed and presented by people who didn't understand the
purpose of the brackets. It seems that they have discovered this too, and though they have
it on sale, it's only available in the USA. Before it disappears altogether, here are some views of it:

The first two images clearly show the camera mounted too low and too far forward. It also
appears to be only possible to mount the camera horizontally, somewhat out of keeping with
current usage. I suspect that you can compensate for that with a macro rail, but it's not
clear that you can lift the camera high enough to be on the axis of the horizontal pivot.

Since then, though, they have come out with no less than three other items at significantly
lower prices:

The cheapest currently costs only US 67.63. Once again it's clear that whoever
mounted it doesn't have any idea of how it should be used:

Here the camera is pointing 90° from the correct direction, it's mounted too low, and
the non-adjustable mounting point is not above the vertical axis point of the rotator.
Alone, this bracket is useless.

But it can be fixed. It's clear that the L bracket where the camera is mounted can be
raised, almost certainly enough to bring it in line with the horizontal pivot axis. And
mount a two-way macro rail on the thing and you can bring the nodal point above the
vertical axis, as long as it doesn't foul the rather-too-close side bar. About the only
thing that's not certain is whether the camera can be mounted vertically. And of course
it's not clear what kind of rotator this has, if any.

The next one costs $74.66 and looks significantly solider. It also has some kind of
rotator (probably without detents), and possibly the mounting point is above the
vertical axis of the rotator. It also has a compass mounted vertically in the side
rotator. But it looks unlikely that it will support mounting the camera in a vertical
position.

The third one is an enigma. According to that page, it costs $89.99. Not enough?
Go to eBay and pay $1,144.69 for exactly the same item. What kind of nonsense is that?

The photos show an almost correct mounting for the camera, along with a lot of potential
ways of mounting it. The first image would almost work if you only wanted the lens axis
to be horizontal. You can also mount the camera vertically, but then there's no way to
position the camera along the lens axis, so it, too, will need a macro rail.

The best thing about this particular bracket is the rotator, but it only does steps of
15° and 24°, not what I need. I could use the 15° detent to get 30° steps by skipping
every second one, but there's no way to get anything close to the 36° that I use for
horizontal panoramas.

On 10 January 2013 I heard from Ed Horka, who pointed me at a
review of this bracket. It does, indeed, come with the third rail, so it has
everything that you might need except for flexible angles on the rotator:

Each of these rails has the advantage of being relatively cheap. They all require some work
to work around the design issues, but I should be able to buy any of them, sell my Manfrotto
and make money. What none of them have is a leveling base. I'll consider that issue
separately after I've addressed the brackets.

Over to Chris Yeardley's place this morning to complete the installation of the nVidia driver. It
had failed: no kernel sources. Brought the thing back home, installed sources and driver,
and it still froze. What a good advertisement for FreeBSD!

I suppose the next step to getting it running on this laptop is to reinstall X. That will take time, and Chris doesn't have time—she has an
assignment which depends on it due in this week. So put a disk together in my test machine
(the one with the broken USB bus) and took that over there for her. I can see more effort
necessary to get her up to speed as quickly as she needs.

Traditionally people use oil in deep fryers, but for years we've been using saturated animal
fat (or “solidified oil”, as
Woolworths prefer to call it). Why? I
had forgotten. It has the significant disadvantages that if you let it solidify when the
basket is in the fat, you can't get it out again, and also that you need to liquefy both the
old and the new fat before changing it (the latter so that the heating element can be
covered before being turned on). So: we tried oil again. Bad mistake. It
decomposes much faster and froths badly:

Why am I not doing more work in the garden? Clearly it has something to do with the
weather, but today wasn't too bad. In the end planted some more petunias—despite the
recommendation “full sun”, others have done well in relative shade, so I planted some where
I had originally intended on the north-west corner of the house. I wonder how many of these
recommendations come from colder climates, such as
the UK.

Also replanted some “Galah” Sedum, a name we have given to a grey and red variety. We had
had them in a pot on the verandah, but the ones planted in the ground (and not watered) seem
to have been doing a lot better, so put the other ones in the same area.

I suppose it's typical that the sum mentioned ($112.60) doesn't match the one on yesterday's
letter ($142.60), although it's dated the following day. Is it time to contact them?
Maybe. But contacting them means doing it in writing, since their telephone people don't
seem to do anything, and I really should do it person-to-person with proof of delivery. And
that costs money.

It's been almost exactly a year since we bought
an Echium plant at last year's Ballarat
Gardens in Spring. It has grown like fury and is now 4 metres high. But that presents a
wind load, and we've had a lot of wind. By this morning the plant looked dangerously close
to blowing over. Tied it to a nearby vent pipe, in the process discovering that it's
surprisingly thorny. Here before and after:

This is the first time I've done a series of photos in October. I've been making the photos
since 27 June 2010, but for some reason (possibly Ballarat Gardens in
Spring) I missed it last October, so this month I don't have any direct comparisons.

More new plants are coming out. In addition to the
yellow Alstroemerias that we planted
two years ago, and which have multiplied greatly, we also have a white version. And many of
the annuals we have planted in previous years are still with us in their second or third
years, such as these Alyssum
and Petunias. One of the “Galah Sedum”
that I mentioned recently is also flowering, predictably with yellow flowers:

A number of the plants that we planted last year are now coming into flower. Here the
Cymbidium that we bought
in Stawell, the
Echium I mentioned above, with
particularly pretty flowers, and
the Pseudofumaria alba, which
was sold to us as a Corydalis:

The Camellias are in bloom, not overly
satisfactorily. The white ones have always irritated me by the way they go brown, and
though the new Camellia
japonica is pretty, the blooms are much smaller than I expected

Most of the roses are looking happy, including the climbing rose that we inherited here and
transplanted so many times that it never got round to flowering, and also the transplanted
“Gruß an Aachen” and “Monsieur Tillier”, but not the rose I transplanted far too late
earlier this month: